Win98 cleanup question 1

[darnell1]

I was working on a friends Win98 machine. I had reformatted it last week and reinstalled Norton AV, spybot, ad-aware, etc.

A week later, they cannot even boot their machine. I booted to safemode and looked at the installed programs. It had a lot of "search" toolbars, etc. I started going through and removing the obvious ones. One, I do not remember which one, had a pop-up box that asked questions why I was uninstalling it. They were pulldowns so not typing involved. You couldnot proceed past this until you did the pulldowns. Once I did that and rebooted, it was missing some part of the operating system. It took awhile to reformat and reinstall everything but I did not want to take any chances that something was left behind.

Has anyone seen or heard of these pop-up boxes that ask questions while uninstalling??

Thanks,

 

[vop]

Have a look at this forum's last ten posts or so:

-Security, hacker detection & forensics Forum
forum83

A firewall and/or router may have been able to prevent or minimize what you are now seeing. You need to control incoming (infection) and outgoing (update request) traffic less it comes to control you.

See also a tutorial - Windows Forensics Have I been Hacked:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/index.php?showtutorial=24.

'TCPView' and 'Process Explorer' may help shine some light on causal issues.

Vince
_____________________________________________________________
[*** If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking. ***]

 

[mattjurado]

I see this all the time (the programs asking why I want to uninstall, and why I'm the devil if I do, and "But this program does ALL this good stuff for you!".

Just they way they are. While I'm a fan of having a router on broadband, and they should always be in place, its not going to help this SPECIFIC problem. What will help is to use a different browser. I recommend Firefox for IE fans.

Matt J.

Please always take the time to backup any and all data before performing any actions suggested for ANY problem, regardless of how minor a change it might seem. Also test the backup to make sure it is intact.

 

[vop]

CONSEQUENCE: 'missing some part of the operating system"


CAUSE?: Are we talking causation by injected malware here and/or indiscriminant user downloads?

PREVENTION: How did the apps likely get on that system and how might your users avoid preventable reoccurances? Are we talking tools or education here?

Vince
_____________________________________________________________
[*** If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking. ***]

 

[darnell1]

VOP,

I believe it is an education issue. When the friends son was questioned about surfing the Internet and clicking on ads and accepting the popup boxes, his response was "but I could win a million dollars"

Thanks for the link on being hacked. Not sure if that was the case here. Just had a lot of bargain buddy and seach toolbars in the programs.

MattJ,

I will try FireFox and see what the difference is, and if its better, install it on the friends machine. I am trying to firure out if there was anything else I could have done about cleaning up the system and what it apparently deleted in the process.

 

[Wxguesser]

Firefox or Mozilla is defintely the way to go. It has the same feel as IE but much more control and security settings. I'm running a side by side comparison of Mozilla and Firefox just to see which one I like better. So far I prefer Mozilla but the rest of the family likes Firefox.
I would also recommend Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird instead of OE or Outlook. It takes just a little tweaking but once set up I find it far superior to OE or Outlook.

Jim W.